Welcome, one and all, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, ladies and gentleman, I'm gonna be covering an animated film from 2012. That movie is "Psychic School Wars".
Now, I didn't know that this movie even existed right up until about a month ago. And I discovered this movie when I was looking up information on another movie that I had some interest in covering. So I decided to find out what this movie was even about. From what little information I could find, it started off as a sci-fi novel from 1973 in Japan. It was then later adapted into four television dramas within the span of 20 years. It also had 2 live-action movies. One in 1981, and another in 1997. And then we also got this anime film, which is the one I'm gonna be watching tonight, that came out almost a decade ago. What's funny about all this is that the information I found on this movie, all of it came from this movie's Wikipedia. If you try to search this movie on Wikipedia, the only thing that it's going to give you is the character's names and their personalities. Which, I didn't bother to read the latter, because I wanted to go into this movie as blind as possible. But, at the very least, if I don't remember their names by the time I finished this thing, at least I'll have it there in case I need to talk about something when I eventually review this thing.
So, as you can tell, I have almost no idea what I'm getting myself into. I say 'almost', because there is one thing about this movie that kinda peeked my interest, and it's a tagline that I found on IMDB. The tagline says "He came back from the future to take over the school...". I am not kidding. That's all it says on there. So, at least I know that much going in. I have no idea who they are referring to, and I don't know why this guy decided to come back from the future to take over a school, but it does leave me kinda curious. I'm certainly hoping that this film is going to be decent. And the only way I'm gonna find out, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Psychic School Wars".
12 minutes later
Guys, I wish this move would knock this "open zipper" joke off right about now. Because this is like the fourth or fifth time that Natsuki has called our main character "Mr. Open Zipper", and it's getting rather tiresome. Which is funny, considering that just a moment ago, Kenji made a remark about that joke getting old. It's kind of a bad sign already when a movie is doing a critic's job, and that usually isn't a good thing.
14 minutes later
Wait, what the hell is Kenji even firing? I'm going to assume those are, like, fake rubber bullets, so-OK, and he just shot Natsuki down. Great job on getting her attention, dude. But seriously, why the hell would you even have something like that? Is that, like, something he uses to get her attention in case calling her wasn't going to work? It just seems kinda stupid to me. Just saying.
8 minutes later
OK, guys, this has bugging me for a while now, but I feel like, now, I need to bring this up. The lighting in this movie is so fucking pretentious. It is trying to so hard to be stylistic and interesting, but it's kinda ruining this movie because there is so much of it. I'm kinda hoping, maybe, that the movie will tone it down with the lighting, but I'm not totally sure if it's going to.
20 minutes later
You know, guys, this movie has become rather dull. Our story really hasn't made a ton of sense, the characters are kinda shallow, and the way that the lighting is being utilized in this movie is still shit. I am struggling to find anything worth of interest. And, so far, I haven't gotten that as of yet. I'm genuinely hoping that the movie's gonna get better within the next 50 minutes or so. But, as of right now, I kinda have my doubts.
19 minutes later
So...let me see if I understand this plot of Ryoichi's. He came back from the future so that he can find people with hidden psychic abilities and awaken their powers so that the Earth will become inhabitable. And if he doesn't succeed, then he's going to take those he finds with psychic abilities, and bring them back to his own time.........what?! Guys, this story is making less and less sense with each passing moment, and I'm just left with mountains of questions that are never going to get answered.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "Psychic School Wars". I'm gonna shut the movie off...OK. Dear lord, that ending. What the fuck do I even say about that god damn ending?! I guess, without going too much into spoilers, the last 6 minutes or so is a giant mind-fuck that makes almost no sense. Then again, this story doesn't really make much sense anyways, but I'll get into that when I talk about the writing.
I'm gonna start with something different. And it's something I almost never talk about in regards to animation, but I want to start with the lighting. Yes, guys, I actually have to talk about lighting in an animated movie. Specifically, I want to talk about the fucking lens flare. Because there is an excessive amount of it in this movie. If you guys have ever seen J.J. Abrams "Star Trek" film, then this movie almost makes that film blush in jealousy because of it's over-usage in this film. There will be many shots where the sun will get in the way of almost anything. There are many, many shots where you will see the sun's rays popping up in a lot of scenes. Hell, the movie will even focus on shots of the sun, for, like, 10 seconds, because the movie needed to either pad itself out to an hour and 46 minutes, or it needed to remind the viewer that it was trying to be all stylistic and cool. But it fails at being that, because it ended up being incredibly annoying, and it didn't really stop until the movie finished. This is one of the most painful-looking films to watch, if just solely for the fucking lighting. And it's not just an issue involving the lens flare, there are also quite a few flashbacks or dream sequences where the lighting will just be up it's own ass by becoming bright as possible. Guys, there's being stylistic with how you want your movie to look, and then there's also learning to tone it the fuck down, so that way the viewers who are watching your movie won't experience a seizure. In fact, even though I'm jumping the gun when it comes to recommendations, I cannot recommend this movie to anybody who has this sort of disability. Because of it's over-obnoxiousness involving the lighting, it's going to take you out of the movie entirely. And I don't want anyone who has that kind of disability to run that risk of getting a seizure when watching this thing. It is just an overly lit movie, that it's going to make you want to avoid this thing. And that is something I never thought I would say about a fucking movie, but, holy shit, is this one making a case for that. To anyone else who doesn't have that disability, they're just gonna find the lighting in this movie to be incredibly annoying, because it spends so much time showing you how much it loves to be up it's own ass with anything involving the lens flare, or just the lighting in general in this movie.
Now, setting aside that issue, let's finally get into the writing itself. Our story almost makes no fucking sense. So, I brought up that tagline earlier from IMDB about how some guy comes back from the future to take over the school. I had no idea why before watching this thing. But after sitting through it myself, it still doesn't make any sense. So, we have this guy named Ryoichi, who comes in this school as a transfer student. And this one girl named Kahori is fascinated by him, even though she's only met him for one day. And it turns out that this guy has psychic powers, and he comes back from the future to basically find anyone with these hidden abilities so that he can save the Earth from being uninhabitable. I want to touch upon that plan, because it still makes no fucking sense. So, it started off when he saves this one girl from committing suicide. And through this magical item or whatever, he's able to show her something, and is somehow able to change her mind so that he can use her to fulfill his agenda. This agenda, I guess, was to ban all cell phones from school, because people have been using them too much, seeing as how they don't use real communication. By the way, this movie beats you over the head with this fucking message that cell phones are awful and that different communication is far more useful in the way that we look at the world by just talking to each other. Look, I get that. Cell phones, well current ones way, can be distracting. We use them almost every single day in our lives, that, without a perfect balance of how we use them, it can take up much of our time. But this movie blatantly comes out and says "Cell phones are bad and you should feel bad for using them because they can cause harm with communication". This movie is fucking enamored with it's blatant message that it almost hurts to watch. But going to back to this plan of Ryoichi's. So, his big plan is to help people unlock their hidden ability to use psychic powers so that people won't have to use their cell phones anymore to communicate, which will somehow end up saving the Earth from becoming uninhabitable. Why does he do this? Well, at one point, he explains to Kahori that the people of Earth had to leave the planet because our way of enduring life became uninhabitable. So much so that they had to move everyone to the moon, and the Earth wouldn't become inhabitable for 1000 years because they don't have the technology or the resources to go back there. And then in a moment of fuck you that's why, teenagers started to develop psychic abilities on the moon. And he figures that it would be the only hope his people have, so he could come back to the past and help try to unlock the people's abilities at this school, so that they can unlock their psychic powers. None of this shit makes any sense. And the reason why it makes no sense is because he dumps us with this mountain of exposition, and nothing else. This movie falls into the trap of "Tell. Don't show". Show us HOW the Earth became uninhabitable. Show us HOW the people got use to life on the moon after they had to leave Earth. Show us HOW cell phones are ruining people's lives that they caused all this bad shit to happen. Show us something, anything! But no. This movie only wants to tell you this shit, and not show anything in return. Because the people who wrote this were too fucking lazy to put in that amount of effort.
As for our characters, honestly, most of them are rather shallow and bland. Our main character, Kenji, is rather dense to the fact that Natsuki has a crush on him, and that his pants are not always zipped up. This is one of the most stereotypical, cliche tropes I have seen in anime, where there's this really cute girl, and the guy has no idea as to what romance is like. It is dull, and very cliche. And it's no different here. Natsuki is, basically, this girl who, as I stated, has a crush on Kenji, who happens to have a crush on Kahori. Despite the fact that she's been friends with him since childhood, and is also her next door neighbor, he happens to like another girl. This girl, Kahori, also happens to have a crush for Ryoichi, even though she's only met him for one day. So, you can kinda guess where this is going. It's one of these love triangle stories that showcases nothing new, or different. And I, personally, hate these kinds of stories. Mainly because, I don't like teen romance in general. But going back to the characters, I couldn't tell you a single memorable thing about Kahori, outside of the fact that she likes Ryoichi. Oh, and she also seems to like Kenji's dog, which is named Shiro. Beyond that, she really has no personality to speak of. And then we have Ryoichi. I've already touched upon his plan, which still makes no fucking sense, so there's no need for me to go over it again here. One other thing about him that I want to touch upon is his dialogue. Most of Ryoichi's dialogue in this movie is shit. Part of the reason why is because most of his dialogue sounds incredibly cryptic. Now, I don't know if that was, in part, due to the English voice direction, or if that's how the novel this thing was based on was written, and they were trying to match that as close as possible. In fact, I don't even know if this movie was even true to the source material. But if it was, then I'm probably going to avoid the novel, if that's how this novel's dialogue was written. And even if it wasn't, then I still wouldn't care, because this story is boring as shit. Like I said, it makes no sense, and I feel like there should've been more to this story. But since the filmmakers were too lazy to add in any kind of background or depth, it just comes across as rather rushed, and I feel like they just took certain elements from the novel and shoehorned it into this movie in hopes that it would make some level of sense. Which it obviously doesn't.
So, our writing is mostly terrible. What about the acting? Well, seeing as how I watched this movie on YouTube, the only version that was available to me was the English dub. So, I'm gonna be judging the acting from the dub's standard. And the dub here is kind of a mixed bag. I actually recognize a few of the voice actors in this movie, because a few of them were voice actors that worked over at 4Kids in New York. And some of them do a decent job here. The only one who of that particular cast that phoned it in was Scottie Ray. For those who don't know, Scottie Ray was mostly known for voicing the Shredder from the 2003 Ninja Turtles cartoon. And he also voiced Zane Truesdale from "Yu-Gi-Oh! GX". And for those roles, he was able to make them work. Except when he has to voice this creature for this movie. I want to say that it looks like a ferret, but I'm not totally sure if it is one. And for the few scenes that he was in, it sounded like Scottie was just reading off the script without giving any kind of emotion to his voice. Which I'm not going to entirely blame Scottie's performance on, because you can only do so much with a script that's kinda written like shit. The other voice actor I want to make mention of is the guy who voiced Ryoichi. He goes by the name of Daniel J. Edwards. I looked up his filmography, and the only other thing that I recognized him from was when he voiced Aigami from "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions", which was a movie that I covered way back during my 50th episode. And I remembered his performance in that thing being pretty good. This thing, however, it sounded like he was trying desperately to make his terrible dialogue work. But it just ended up failing, because his character was just really poorly written. While I'm on the subject of this movie's dub, it also looked like that some of the characters dialogue didn't necessarily match up with the mouth movements of the characters. Now, I don't know if that was just the version of it I watched on YouTube, or it might've been a technical issue on my end. I don't know. Either way, it is rather noticeable in certain areas. Overall, guys, the dub in this movie is kinda weak.
Animation in this movie is pretty good. The character designs are beautifully done, the color palettes are fine, the art style is great, and it's animated very well. Backgrounds also look amazing, too. This movie utilizes quite a bit of CG, which, for the most part, looks pretty good. The only exception to this is when we focus in on a few shots of a train passing by, and the CG on those models looks kinda like shit. And, unlike the CG train models I watched in "Mirai", the CG for the trains in this movie doesn't really look that great. However, it's only for a few shots that you see these particular trains, so it's not a huge deal, overall. And as much as I'd like to say that this is a beautiful film to look at, unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the really good animation in this movie is boggled down by the awful fucking lens flare, and the other noticeable lighting issues in this movie. And for a majority of the film, most people aren't going to notice the really good animation, because they'll be too busy getting their eyes shined in from the fucking sun in this movie. I swear, guys, if there's one thing that you're going to get sick of looking at in this movie, it's the fucking sun. This movie, without that sun, would've looked amazing. However, seeing as how it's noticeably there, it takes a great looking film, and it just makes it look subpar at best.
Sound-mix here is decent. However, I did notice several moments where the music will drown out some of the character's dialogue. But it's only for about several scenes, so it's not too much of an issue. The music here is fine. A lot of it is just piano music, which I'm not against. It's nothing ultra special, but it is fine to listen to.
Overall, guys, am I able to recommend "Psychic School Wars"? Honestly, no. I can't recommend it, unless if you are, maybe, a fan of those really god awful teen drama's such as "One Tree Hill" and "Dawson's Creek". If you are a fan of either one of those shows, you MIGHT end up enjoying this movie. However, seeing as how I'm not into that kind of shit, this movie doesn't really do anything for me. I also can't recommend this movie to anyone who are really prone to light seizures. Because this movie, obviously, has an over-abundance of that, mostly thanks to the lens flare. But even with that, this story make no sense whatsoever, our characters are all shallow and boring as shit, and we have a dub that's kind of weak. This movie is just not that interesting, in the end. I'm gonna tell you, guys, part of the reason why I wanted to cover this movie was because of that title. It sounded kinda interesting. However, I have been proven, once more, that cool titles don't make for a good movie. Or, at least, an interesting one for that matter. But if you seriously have to watch this movie, it is on YouTube, at least by the time that I've written this Reaction & Review. So, you can go ahead and check it out if you're really curious. But as for me, well...I'm gonna go watch something better. And I think I'm gonna go watch a Christmas movie. I'm gonna re-watch my copy of "The Munsters' Scary Little Christmas". Because it's almost been a full year since I last watched it, and I had more of a fun time watching that, then watching this thing.
Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all in the near future. Peace.
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